Inverted exchange rates.

[deane@gooroos.com]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 10:42:42PM -0800, Chris Lyttle wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 20:49, deane@mjollnir.gooroos.com wrote:
> > 
> > 1) The transfer window seems to require inverted exchange rates.  For
> >    example, I am transferring US$100 to CAD account and the exchange rate
> >    that I got from the bank was 1.5 (i.e. each US$ bought me CAD 1.50).
> >    But if I enter '1.5' into the exchange rate field of the transfer
> >    window, it only credits my CAD account with CAD 666.67.  In other words,
> >    it has *divided* the source amount by the exchange rate rather than
> >    multiplying it.
> 
> Actually this is because you are not using the correct rate. The
> calculation GnuCash does is 'value = exchange-rate * amount'. If you go
> to the following link;
> http://finance.yahoo.com/m3?u
> 
> You'll see that to make an exchange from US$ to CAD$ the multiplier is
> 0.6306 (or thereabouts). When I input this into the Transfer dialog the
> amount is correct.
> (BTW 1.586 is the rate to change CAD$ to US$)

The chart you link to above gives no indication of which way it is to be
read, and I think that you are reading it incorrectly.  You're looking at
the rate to change CAD to USD.

To clear up the confusion, immediately above the chart are a set of fields.
Use them to convert one US dollar to CAD and the page you get will tell you
that the exchange rate is 1.5842 (which I was rounding to 1.5 for
simplicity).  But putting that number into the Transfer dialog will not
give the correct result.  Instead, you have to invert it.

> > 2) As someone else has already mentioned, the amount being transferred
> >    shows up in my CAD account as US dollars, which is very disconcerting.
> >    I have the habit of putting "(USD)" at the end of all my US dollar
> >    account names, so it's reasonably obvious what's going on, but for
> >    someone who doesn't do that, it'll look like gnucash is making errors
> >    because the numbers do not appear to add up properly.
>
> Yes this is a known bug. See
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99083
> (Please checkout the bugs database so you're aware of reports and
> possible add to the existing reports if possible rather than post them
> here)

I normally do, but I'd read an earlier post by someone else and the
response was "this is not a bug, it's the way that it should be", so it
sounded like more advocacy was required to get it changed.  That'll teach
me to take someone else's word.  :-)

Nice to see that it really *is* considered to be a bug.

> > 3) Having made the transfer, is there any way to find out what exchange
> >    rate was used, other than pulling out a calculator and doing it by hand?
> 
> Not at the present time, though we were discussing just today ways we
> could do this.

That would be cool.

Thanx.

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